5 big garden trends for 2025
As preparations get under way for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025, we take a look at what garden designers are planning and how those concepts translate into ideas for our own outdoor spaces.
From dog-friendly gardens to the rise of revolutionary natural material, we turn our attention to five key themes emerging from the upcoming show and how they are set to be some of the biggest ideas in the gardening world next year.
Below are 5 garden trends for look out for 2025...
AI gardens
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword dominating practically every walk of life at the moment, but can it really be integrated into a garden?
Tom Massey’s and Je Ahn’s Avanade Intelligent Garden will demonstrate how. “Let’s be clear, AI didn’t design the garden,” Tom says. “The garden is green, organic, earthy, not shiny and hi-tech.”
So how exactly is AI involved? “The Intelligent Garden will have a ‘brain’. Wireless sensors will be monitoring it, telling us ‘I need a bit more water’ or ‘I need a haircut’,” Tom explains.
Low-cost sensors installed across the garden will measure soil pH, temperature, moisture and nutrient levels and help save resources: for example, by tailoring an irrigation system so that it delivers water only when the soil is dry. The data collected by the monitors will be fed back to create a digital “twin” of the garden that visitors can interact with on screen in the garden’s pavilion – a precursor of how we might manage our own gardens in the future.
“There’s no doubt that some jobs will be lost to AI but it can be a force for good used in the right way,” Tom says.
The planting itself is based on a typical forest garden, where trees and shrubs are both beautiful and productive, and includes goji berry bushes (Lycium barbarum) and delicious raspberry-like Japanese wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) – a trend we can easily embrace.
Rise of mycelium
The Intelligent Garden’s pavilion is also worth a closer look. It’s set to built from a revolutionary new material: sustainable mycelium panels.
Mycelium is the root structure of fungi: by cultivating it in agricultural waste material such as straw, it digests the waste, forming a dense mass that can be shaped into panels, bricks or blocks.
A mycelium wall will also feature in The Pathway Garden, which highlights the work of the homeless charity Pathway. In a neat example of a circular economy, the mycelium itself has been grown on waste from 2024’s Chelsea Flower Show.
Designers Allon Hoskin and Robert Beaudin have created the structure of the garden entirely from upcycled materials – including a bench carved from a fallen tree.
Repurposing materials we already have to hand is a trend that we can copy at home while waiting for mycelium-based products to become more widely available.
Dog-friendly gardens
Designing your own garden depends on how you plan to use it. But have you ever stopped to consider what your dog might want from a garden?
Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don says his Golden Retriever Ned had a say in the design of The RHS and Radio 2 Dog Garden, from a stream for wallowing in, a close-cut lawn to roll on, to the comfy doggy chairs in the summerhouse. It’s an idea that Radio 2’s Jo Whiley endorses: “I love gardening and so do my dogs. They follow me round the garden – they’re my gardening squad.”
This is Monty’s first-ever garden at Chelsea and he’s emphatic that there’s nothing “clever” about it. “It’s a simple celebration,” Monty says, “of dogs, gardens, the moment. There’s no hidden symbolism or messages, it’s not a deeply serious garden.”
It reinforces the RHS’s theme for 2025: Your Space, Your Story – a concept that includes us all, inviting us to make our gardens as individual as our own personality.
But there is a serious side to gardening and dogs, as gardener Dawn Grehan of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home – where the garden will eventually be relocated – points out.
“When a dog’s nose and paws engage with its brain, its stress levels are reduced, making it more open to training and engaging with its handlers”, proving that dog-friendly design is something worth bearing in mind.
The RHS and Radio 2 Dog Garden will also feature a fenced-off section, highlighting plants that it’s not such a good idea that your dog comes into contact with unless supervised, including toxic species and those with spiky seeds.
Resilience to unpredictable weather
Back to the future again, and The Killik & Co Futureproof Garden will predict how our gardens might look 25 years from now.
As gardeners, we are already starting to see the effects of climate change – high temperatures, periods of drought followed by flash flooding – and Baz Grainger’s design looks at ways we can plan ahead to reduce the damage.
“We want visitors to understand that by making some adjustments to planting and to managing rainwater, they can significantly improve their garden’s resilience to unpredictable weather,” he says.
His design features a pergola that captures rainwater and channels it into a holding tank. While most of us won’t have the budget for something so elaborate, we can use the same principle. "Invest in a large water butt – or two – to maximise roof water capture, stopping it from flooding your garden,” Baz explains.
“Choose permeable paving or consider installing water channels. And select plants that thrive in wet winters and dry summers: species native to southern France or northern Spain work well.” Finally, if you have space, he suggests planting a tree. “It'll provide shade, absorb water and noticeably reduce the temperature in your garden. Make sure you choose a species suitable for the UK's future climate such as Zelkova, a type of elm or resilient Pinus mugo."
Growing plants from seed
Celebrating growing plants from seed is one of the themes of The Seeding Success Garden, Joe Perkins’ design for the King’s Trust (formerly the Prince’s Trust), which helps young people to develop skills and realise their potential. Starting plants off from seed is something we can all enjoy with minimal outlay and a little patience.
"There's something very special about watching a plant grow from a seed you've planted yourself, " Joe says. "Seeing it bloom and, sometimes, even produce something delicious to eat is truly one of life's greatest pleasures.”
Seeding Success is the King’s Trust’s first garden at Chelsea and features pioneer plants – tough adaptable species that are the first plants to colonise bare soil, growing rapidly from seed. Keep this in mind if you’ve just moved to a new house and are staring in despair at bare garden borders or an expanse of earth that’s just been cleared.
“The optimism and resilience of quick-growing annual plants is embodied in this design,” Joe says. “I've included plants like Nigella, Lunaria, Pulsatilla and Papaver, which can flower and set seed within one season, alongside other less familiar pioneer-type plants such as tough Mexican tulip poppies (Hunnemannia fumariifolia) with big bright yellow flowers."
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